Officers searching scrubland around the Praia da Luz resort for the body of Maddie McCann, or a clue to her whereabouts, are still shooting in the dark, cold case specialist Alan Bailey told the Sunday World.

The former head of the Irish Cold Case unit claims that the Metropolitan Police search is far to wide and lacking direction and demonstrates a lack of commitment to the case, exclusively claims today. The search by over 30 UK officers started on Monday and is due to end on Friday and is scheduled to include three parcels of land within a mile of the resort where Maddie disappeared has been criticised for a lack direction after the Metropolitan Police Force has come up with a litany of competing theories as to how Maddie disappeared in 2007

“A four day search on a four acre site including 12 different sites designated for specific ground radar searches , shows a lack of commitment. Either you are going to search the area fully and completely, or you are not. If you can exclude the scrubland and potential burial sites or areas where clothing of evidence may have been discarded within a square kilometer of the apartment where she was last seen, then it becomes a very different type of crime”, Bailey, an eminent cold case investigator, told the Sunday World.

The ground radar machinery which has been used by the Sunday World cold case team can only search small areas to a depth that makes sense on this landscape which is about four metres deep. It is unlikely that a body or any evidence would be buried any deeper. It also requires a great deal of time to crunch the numbers as they try isolate relevant anomalies under the ground which may indicate where something is hidden or indeed was hidden.

There is some dispute on the range of the ground being searched but it is nonetheless a rather widespread search ground but with only 12 small sites being targeted for underground radar it is hard to exclude the area - a mound - a short walk from a man was seen carrying a child around ten pm on the night she disappeared.

One reporter on the ground said that it took him five minutes to run around the search site.

It seems unlikely this limited search overt a wide area will even succeed in excluding the site as a potential burial site.

Any ground disturbance indicating a burial site would have been much more visible in the days after Maddie disappeared when there was an extensive search of the mound site.

The specialist says that if she was abducted by a fixated preferential paedophile in an opportunist way, then local scrubland would be a place to abuse and get rid of evidence but this was extensively searched and crisscrossed seven years ago.

“Most of these kind of abductions are really wrong place, wrong time, and so, an opportunist predator could have spotted Maddie leaving her apartment searching for her mother, and snatched her immediately. These offenders don’t need much planning because they are always looking for an configuration of events to make their escape and snatch”, he said.

“An offender needs the child to present themselves, be lost and alone, for example. The environment must be suitable with a lack of CCTV cameras, and a lack of witnesses or potential witness is the third requirement of the opportunist snatch. If a full search of these sites were conducted then we could exclude this and concentrate on the more planned kidnap and snatch by a gang of paedophiles which is always the more unlikely scenario”, he said.

The investigator says that the Gardai would not have opened up the possibility of a breakthrough on the basis of such a wide search over such a short time. “We would have simply had an open ended search and not finished until we were confident that all the work was done and it cannot be done in four days after a gap of nearly seven years”, Bailey said.

The experience of the Gardai and the PSNI in the search for the disappeared from the troubles, has given these forces an expertise in searching for missing bodies and lost evidence.

“ We know from the disappeared that even when there are tip offs about the locations from those who actually, perpetrated the crimes then it is still very hard to find the bodies so this seems a very unrealistic and overly ambitious search by the Metropolitan Police", he said.

Despite indications of a breakthrough in the case, it is quite clear that the use of spades, pitch forks and some ground penetrating radar across three sites, one of which is over 15 acres of which four acres has been sealed off.

It appears that the Police are looking for a needle in a haystack and are no further in tracking down any predator or finding our what has happened to Maddie.

One source close to the new investigators spoke of the concern among the team that the Met has made very little breakthrough despite the investment of more than 30 full time officers and nearly €10m in the investigation, Operation Grange, which was kick started in 2011 after the intervention of the British Prime Minister.

Police sources say that search locations have been pinpointed by geographic crime profilers.

The sites were based on the distance that a child could have walked from apartment 5a where she disappeared from, or the distance where she could have been carried by a predator, and then perhaps abused or killed.

The investigators will be looking for either a piece of clothing or a body.

This line of enquiry suggests that the new investigators are unhappy with the quality of the original search but also that the new investigators, along with the original Portuguese Police team, believe that Maddie is no longer alive.

The McCann’s have long ignored this possibility understandably, but statistically; victims of child abductions are likely to be killed within days of kidnap.

“Victims of child abductions statistically are unlikely to survive the first 48 hours and the younger they are the more likely they are to be killed earlier. Those rare cases where abductees survive to be sex slaves are typically much, much older”, Professor David Wilson told the Sunday World.

Let's not forget that Doughnut McIntyre already purported that there must have been two abductors, one of them handed her out the window to the other, in a 5-minute timeslot of opportunity. He'll have to do a lot better than this is he's expected to be taken seriously now.

Well that article was hurtful and unhelpful! Particularly the last 3 paragraphs, which state clearly that Madeleine was most likely dead within 2 days of going missing. Paedophiles don't abduct 3 year olds to keep as sex slaves (as if this theory should be any better in the McCanns minds).